5 With...

NamesCon is the largest annual domain industry conference that regularly draws over 1,000 attendees to Las Vegas. At the end of the Summer last year, NamesCon was privately acquired by WorldHostingDays (WHD), a conference producer in the cloud and web hosting industry. In another acquisition at the end of last year, the parent company of WHD, Host Europe Group, was acquired by GoDaddy.

In light of all of these corporate changes involving NamesCon, and with the 2018 conference coming up in a few months, I interviewed Soeren von Varchmin to ask some questions about NamesCon 2018. Soeren serves as President of WorldHostingDays and NamesCon. He joined the company in 2014 after spending ten years in sales and business development roles in the cloud service industry. During this time, Soeren has lived and worked in the US, Europe, and Asia.

I asked Soeren five questions as a part of my long running “5 with…” interview series. Some of his responses were lightly edited for grammatical and punctuation reasons.

If you have additional questions for Soeren or the NamesCon team, I invite you to ask in the comment section.

In the second quarter of 2016, domain industry veterans Jen Sale and Adam Strong launched Evergreen, a full-service naming agency that helps companies create, acquire, and manage their domain names. The company has clients of all sizes throughout the world.

Based on a small island off the east coast of Australia, Jen Sale is the COO (and Co-Founder) of Evergreen. Drawing on her 15+ years domain industry experience, Jen was previously the Co-Founder of DomainGuardians.com, Business Development Manager at DarkBlueSea.com (Fabulous.com) and a Web Designer/Developer. Jen has more experience in the domain name business than most.

With Evergreen’s one year anniversary on the horizon, I had the opportunity to ask Jen some questions about Evergreen and the domain brokerage business. Jen offered some insight into building the business as well as operating within the domain naming space.

What goes into building a business like Evergreen?
We created Evergreen to consolidate the corporate naming services that Adam and I have been providing for around 15 years (Naming/Acquisitions/Management). Building Evergreen has required merging, acquiring, international corporate structuring, branding, product development and constantly growing our network.

In the weeks leading up to THE Domain Conference, one of the most interesting things I learned is that Brandon Abbey, formerly the President of Escrow.com, was hired by Payoneer. For those of you who don’t know of Payoneer, the company is a payment platform used by companies like Airbnb, Amazon, and Google. The company is used in over 200 countries transacting in more than 150 currencies.

In March of 2016, Payoneer acquired Armor Escrow Inc., a California-licensed Internet escrow agent doing business as Armor Payments. Within the past week, the company rebranded its escrow product as Payoneer Escrow, and Brandon Abbey will be working with this business, specifically on its domain name escrow offering.

Because of the company’s entry into the domain space, I interviewed Scott Reynolds, President of Payoneer Escrow. If you have additional questions for Scott (or for Brandon), I invite you to post them in the comment section.

Elliot: Why is Payoneer moving into the domain escrow space?

Scott Reynolds: Since Payoneer’s acquisition of Armor Payments in March of this year, we have seen increasing demand for domain escrow services from

Paul Stahura has had a successful career in the domain business, long before the new gTLD domain names were available. If you aren’t familiar with Paul and his career, I think Ron Jackson’s article about Paul is a great place to learn more about his background.

Paul is the founder of Enom, which he launched in 1997. Enom went on to become one of the largest domain name registrars in the world, and the company was acquired in 2006. In 2010, Paul co-founded Donuts, and he serves as the company CEO. Donuts operates the largest portfolio of new gTLD extensions, and I think this gives Paul a unique perspective on the new gTLD space as well as the domain industry.

I asked Paul a series of five questions covering topics related to the new gTLD domain names and his company. If you have additional questions you would like Paul to answer, I invite you to post them in the comment section and perhaps he will find some time to answer them.

I appreciate that Paul was willing to be interviewed, and I hope you find the information he shared to be interesting.

Elliot: What Donuts accomplishments are you most proud of during the last 3 years?

As CEO of XYZ, Daniel Negari has seen the .XYZ extension become the largest new gTLD domain name extension. According to nTLDStats.com, there are nearly 6.5 million registered .XYZ domain names, and the extension has a 27.79% market share of all registered new gTLD domain names. Daniel’s company also operates other extensions such as .College, .Rent, .Security, .Protection, .Theatre, .Cars, .Car, and .Auto.

There has been a considerable amount of industry talk about the marketing strategies and tactics undertaken by XYZ. For this 5 question interview, I asked Daniel about other topics related to his business and the new gTLD extensions.

If you have questions for Daniel, you are welcome to ask them. Please keep your comments or questions respectful, as I have a low tolerance for rudeness and uncivil discussion when people have been nice enough to participate in an interview like this.

Elliot: What are your goals for .XYZ in the next 3 years and how do you plan to achieve them?

It has been a while since my last “5 With…” five question interview, and I thought it would be neat to revive this series by interviewing Andrew Rosener, CEO of Media Options.

Andrew runs one of the most successful domain name brokerage firms, and his company has also done very well investing in domain names. When it comes to getting domain name industry observations or feedback about a particular domain name, Andrew is one of the few people I rely on to get honest, first-hand insight. There is probably just a small amount of people regularly working on acquisitions and sales as hard as I am working, and Andrew is definitely in this group.

I asked Andrew several questions about the state of his business and the current state of the domain name aftermarket. Although Andrew shares his thoughts regularly on Domain Sherpa, I think he provided some interesting insight in this interview. I am sure he would be willing to answer more questions if you want to ask in the comment section.

As always, I appreciate Andrew’s time spent answering these questions, especially with his wife Anna’s due date rapidly approaching.

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